An extensive Roman Catholic private school system grew up after the secularization of state education. From 1970 these schools were subsidized, and after 1975 most became integrated into the state system and funded by the state.
Rural and native education was given increasing attention in New Zealand. Consolidated schools, served by an extensive transportation system, were a longtime feature of rural education. The expansion of community colleges and the establishment of rural education activity programs extended regional opportunities. Children and adults in isolated districts were served by several correspondence schools. Maori education became a responsibility of the Department of Education in 1879. Starting in 1962, the government attempted to balance the need for remediation of deficiencies in general schooling with Maori cultural rights. As in other countries, equity and the relationship between school and work were the two main issues facing the New Zealand school system. Together they represented growing social and economic demands that were potentially incompatible with the traditional order of schooling. Robert Frederic Lawson Revolutionary patterns of education Russia: from tsarism to communism Before 1917
At the turn of the 20th century the Russian Empire was in some respects educationally backward. According to the census of 1897, only 24 percent of the population above the age of nine were literate. By 1914 the rate had risen to roughly 40 percent. The large quota of illiteracy reflected the fact that by this time only about half the children between the ages of 8 and 12 attended school. The elementary schools were maintained by the zemstvo (local government agencies), the Orthodox church, or the state and the secondary schools mainly by the Ministry of Education.
After the Revolution of 1905, the Duma (parliament) made considerable efforts to introduce compulsory elementary schooling. At the upper stages of the educational system, progress was significant, too; nevertheless, the secondary schools (gimnazii, realnyye uchilishcha) were only to a small degree attended by students of the lower classes, and the higher institutions even less. Preschool education as well as adult education was left to the private initiative of the educationally minded intelligentsia, who were opposed to the authoritarian character of state education in the schools. In 1915–16 the minister of education, Count P.N. Ignatev, started serious reforms to modernize the secondary schools and to establish a system of vocational and technical education, which he regarded as most important for the industrialization of Russia. During the Provisional Government (February to October 1917, Old Style), the universities were granted autonomy, and the non-Russian nationalities received the right of instruction in their native languages. The education system envisaged by the liberal-democratic and moderate Socialist parties was a state common school for all children based on local control and the direct participation of society. 1917–30
After the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik Party proclaimed a radical transformation of education. Guided by the principles of Karl Marx and influenced by the contemporary movement of progressive education in the West as well as in Russia itself, the party and its educational leaders—Nadezhda K. Krupskaya and Anatoly V. Lunacharsky—tried to realize the following revolutionary measures as laid down in the party’s program of 1919: (1) the introduction of free and compulsory general and polytechnical education up to the age of 17 within the Unified Labour School, (2) the establishment of a system of preschool education to assist in the emancipation of women, (3) the opening of the universities and other higher institutions to the working people, (4) the expansion of vocational training for persons from the age of 17, and (5) the creation of a system of mass adult education combined with the propaganda of communist ideas. In 1918 the Soviet government had ordered by decree the abolition of religious instruction in favour of atheistic indoctrination, the coeducation of both sexes in all schools, the self-government of students, the abolition of marks and examinations, and the introduction of productive labour. In 1919, special workers’ faculties (rabfaks) were created at higher institutions and universities for the development of a new intelligentsia of proletarian descent.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin addressing a crowd during the Russian Revolution of 1917.© Photos.com/Thinkstock
During the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–27), when there was a partial return to capitalistic methods, the revolutionary spirit somewhat diminished, and the educational policy of party and state concentrated on the practical problems of elementary schooling, the struggle against juvenile delinquency, and the schooling of adult illiterates. When the policy of five-year plans began in 1928 under the slogan of “offensive on the cultural front” and with the help of the Komsomol (the communist youth league), the campaign against illiteracy and for compulsory elementary schooling reached its climax. The Stalinist years, 1931–53
In connection with the policy of rapid industrialization and collectivization of farmers and with the concentration of political power in the hands of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet educational policy in the 1930s experienced remarkable changes. Starting with the decree of 1931, the structure and the contents of school education underwent the following process of “stabilization” in the next few years: (1) four years was laid down as the compulsory minimum of schooling for the rural districts, and seven years for the cities, (2) the new system of general education embraced the grades one to four (nachalnaya shkola), the grades five to seven, which continued the elementary stage on the lower secondary level (nepolnaya srednyaya shkola), and the grades eight to 10, which provided a full secondary education (polnaya srednyaya shkola), (3) the new curriculum was to provide the students with a firm knowledge of the basic academic subjects and was to be controlled by a system of marks and examinations, (4) the decisive role of the teacher within the educational process was reestablished, while the Pioneers and Komsomol organizations (for youth aged 10 to 15 years and 14 to 26 years, respectively) were above all to instill a sense of discipline and an eagerness for learning, and (5) manual work disappeared from the school curriculum as well as from the teacher-training institutions. In addition, the ideas of progressive education were rejected, and older Russian traditions began to be cultivated. During World War II the idea of Soviet patriotism emerged fully, penetrating the theory and practice of education. The principles of the outstanding educator Anton S. Makarenko, with their emphasis on collectivism, gained ground upon the former influence of Western educational thought.
Joseph Stalin.Photos.com/Thinkstock
The institutions of higher learning were reshaped in the 1930s, too. The number of students in institutions providing secondary specialized education, usually called tekhnikumy, rapidly grew from one million in 1927–28 to 3.8 million in 1940–41. The number of students in institutions of higher education (vyssheye uchebnoye zavedeniye) grew from 168,554 to 811,700 in the same period. The main characteristics of higher education that developed in this period remained unchanged for the next decades: the paramount task of higher learning was to provide specialized vocational training within the framework of manpower policy and economic plans; strict control of the student’s program was to be imposed by the central authorities; and the system of evening and correspondence instruction on the level of higher and secondary specialized education (vecherneye i zaochnoye obrazovaniye) was to parallel full-time studies.